Reconsidering Open Borders

Abstract

I am very grateful to Peter Meilaender for his fair-minded, comprehensive, and perceptive reading of my work. He has rightly identified some key con? tinuities and tensions in my writing about immigration, and I welcome the opportunity to develop my reflections further in response to his analysis. I want to begin by saying a few things about how I first came to articulate the open borders argument and how my thinking about the issue has evolved. I'll explain how the open borders argument should be qualified and contextualized and why, in my view, the core of the argument remains valid. Along the way, I'll respond at various points to Meilaender's concerns, and at the end I'll address directly the two challenges that he has posed. When I started thinking about the ethics of immigration many years ago, I was motivated by my puzzlement about the first Haitian refugee crisis in the late 1970s (and by my need to write a paper for a faculty seminar on citizen? ship). I had no particular preconceptions about what Americans (or anyone else) should do about the Haitians, but I felt torn between the sense that there was something wrong in excluding people in such obvious need and the feel? ing that admitting everyone with comparable claims would be overwhelming and would be especially harmful to those already most disadvantaged in America. I turned for guidance to contemporary liberal theories and reached the conclusion, somewhat to my surprise, that various versions of liberal the? ory all pointed in the direction of open borders. That was the argument I laid out in my 1987 article. Nevertheless, I felt somewhat ambivalent about the argument, uncertain whether it revealed a deep moral problem with the exclusionary practices of liberal states (which was the view I emphasized in the article) or the limitations of abstract liberal theory (which was a concern I pursued in subsequent work). At this point I think that both are true to